"It has to get better," defensive coordinator Billy Davis said after the game.

That is the understatement of the century.

The defense allowed a whopping 539 yards to the Chargers in their home opener, 413 of which came through the air by Phillip Rivers. River carved the Eagles up all day, spreading the ball around even after Malcom Floyd had to be carted off the field. Rivers hit six-receivers, three of which had at least had three four catches.

"It didn't seem like we had that matched up very well," Chip Kelly said.

The defense was unable to get off the field, allowing the Chargers to convert on 10 of 15 third downs. Half of those conversions came in the fourth quarter alone, when the Chargers successfully converted 5 out of 7 third down attempts.

"We weren't able to get off the field on 3rd down," Boykin said. "That really hurt us."

The Eagles inability to get off the field allowed the Chargers to rack up long drives. San Diego won the time of possession battle in each quarter, and ended up having the ball over twice as long as the Eagles did (40:17 to 19:43).

"That's our fault. We have to get ourselves off the field," Davis said. "That's the thing about defensive football. You get yourself off the field, you get your rest. We weren't making the plays in the second half on third down- in the field half, we weren't making them in the first half."

As to what went wrong, linebacker Casey Matthews and Kelly had differing takes on what happened.

The reality is that both are true, but it also had to do with an injured secondary. The Eagles were without Bradley Fletcher, who missed the game due to a concussion. The loss of Fletcher was bad enough, but the Eagles had Brandon Boykin and Brandon Hughes both go down during different points of the game.

"We do a good job of that in practice- everyone rotates and everybody knows every position," Brandon Boykin said. "Chung came in at nickle, I went to corner, Earl went to safety. It was just a matter of us not making plays."

Nate Allen had a rough day, missing tackles and failing to keep Eddie Royal from the end zone in the beginning of the second quarter. His poor play caused him to be sent to the bench for a few series, with rookie Earl Wolff taking his place.

Asked after the game if a change might be coming with the safeties, Kelly sounded like a man defeated to the reality that this is what he could be in for all season.

"There aren't any safeties on the street, I can tell you that." Kelly said. "We'll play with the ones we got."

The secondary will catch the majority of the heat this week, but the rest of the team did nothing to help them. The defensive line failed to get pressure on Rivers all day, something both Kelly and Davis noted when asked about the struggles of the secondary.

At 1-1, the question for the Eagles now becomes- what now? Through two games the Eagles are allowing an average of 30 points per game, a number that is clearly not going to fly if the team has any plans of competing this season.

"The whole defense has a lot of room to improve, obviously," Davis. "We said after last week we were happy with our performance, this week we came up short- there is still a lot of work to do done. We gotta work our tails off and get these things fixed."

The Eagles have enough problems to take up an entire off-season, let alone four days. Andy Reid and his 2-0 Kansas City Chiefs are coming to town on Thursday, giving the Eagles a short week to try to fix problems that might prove to not be fixable.

"The Chiefs are going to watch the film," Matthews said. "and try to do exactly what the Chargers did,"